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A fast way to convert to plain text on Mac OS X

What is it doing? This command pastes your text from the “pasteboard” (hence the pb in pbpaste and pbcopy) and pipes (|) it back to the pasteboard. Since these commands don’t support richtext by default it gets stripped.

I use this sometimes when I have a lot of little pieces to cut and paste. It’s easy to command-tab to the terminal. Press up to run the previous command and press enter. Some applications have a special shortcut command (Ctrl-Shift-V) to do this but many don’t.